Founder of Trinity Broadcast Network, Paul Crouch, Dead at 79

It's been awhile since I've kicked a dead televangelist, what with kicking live ones like Pat Robertson (who really should consider retiring) and Kenneth Copeland being so much more meaningful. But Paul Crouch Sr., who started TBN way back in the day with James and Tammy Faye Bakker before they scooted off to form PTL Ministries, was a one of a kind. He made about as much money off of the word of Iron Age scribes channeling a Bronze Age sun god and little old folks' pension checks as could be made without the IRS actually wading in and shutting the whole grift down. The Crouch family, under the tutelage of this partiarch, lived the words of the New Testament "In my father's house there are many mansions" by in fact having many, many mansions, and will continue to do so, even as they have raised theme parks and eyebrows.

One might call it macabre of me to mark the occasion by recounting what little we know of the man's sins on the occasion of his passing, but for what it is worth, I consider it a particularly shameful endeavor to pimp salvation to simple folks by threatening hell and promising heaven and magic powers through prayer, while vacuuming up their money. It appalls me that the prosperity gospel allows people like Paul Crouch to promote a system where he received handouts from people who themselves might need a hand-up, and he considered that his "reward".

As an atheist, I don't believe in an afterlife reward or punishment for anything. Maybe if the family would be so good as to hold his body up to a tv set, ol' Benny Hinn might get that spirit revived, like Jesus revived Lazarus back in the day. Maybe if they could only send their millions of money to the right people? Would a Rod Parsley holy snotrag possibly fill the bill?

Of course not. But if they only believed? If they only believed? (And did not execute the most awful grifter nouveaux riche tackiness with whatever money they plucked from the poor?)

That was the exact taunt made to living breathing people. Pay them and get saved from what was inevitable and natural. I try not to be quite the New Atheist I used to be when my settling into atheism was new to me, but damn. His was a life that should even shake out a little of the starch from the faithful, and make a bunch of people go looking again for the good in mankind. And they will find that good, but not in some whited and gold-encrusted sepulchre. In other words, don't bother looking into this grave. You'll only find another body.